Poetry
Great Wrinkles Up the Sky's Sleeve
Swaebou Conateh · 1981
Synopsis
Twenty-five poems on the small details of village life, some of which date back to 1965. The village is the author's own, Dippa Kunda, and the poems follow its transformation: the rural settlement is gradually caught up in the Serekunda conurbation. The collection observes this passage from country to town, through everyday life, the customs and the people of the place, and what they become when the town reaches them.
Context
The book appeared in Banjul in 1981 from Baro-Ueli Publications, the first volume of a series devoted to the author's poems, and a second collection of thirty poems, Blind Destiny, followed in 1982, on freedom in independent Africa. In 1971 Conateh had been the first editor of Ndaanan, a magazine founded with other Gambian intellectuals to publish the country's writers, in which Lenrie Peters and Tijan Sallah also appeared.
Who it is for
Short poems in English, direct and accessible, about a Gambian village that the city is gradually absorbing.
Prizes and reception
The history of Gambian literature remembers its author above all as the founder of Ndaanan and a figure of journalism.
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